Blog | Heads Will Roll

March 12, 2008July 22, 2016 by Wickie Stamps

Broke-ass writer reporting in

Hay,

Since my last blog much has evolved. I’ve gotten out of the closet. I do not mean the metaphorical one as in coming out as oddly queer. That I did a LONG time ago. I’m talking about my actual darkened closet, the one I’ve been I was writing in. I don’t know when I started writing in there again or when I stopped. I am sure that the relentless desperation, morose feelings and fear of failure that hound my creative impulses had something to do with going in there. Whether or not they were culpable in my falling out of there…well, let us assume until further notice, that they did. I take no responsibility for the ebbs and flows of my writing patterns. Well, actually I do, but I should know better. Because no matter how much I create writing schedules they all crash into me. We roll around on the floor, get swept into depression, slither into God only knows what rat-hole of my personality and…then here I am again. “Where have you been?,” a queer-punk girl once asked me when I wandered into San Francisco’s only girl punk cafe. “Have I been somewhere?” I asked. I looked at her through the fog of my brain. And that’s the way it goes. I do my creative work with rigor and a discipline then I slip away into the void where we artists go. Sometimes I know I’ve fallen in or out, I never know which. When I know I’m gone, I don’t like it in there. I even try to get out. But can’t. And then. Bam. I’m back, might even know that I’ve been gone. And I get a little more work done. Right now, I’m sitting in our new office (“Our” is Heads Will Roll Films). There is more light in here, but fortunately, there are shades I can pull and a door I can close. So that the next time I slide into the void and am “gone missing” at least I won’t have to answer anymore awkward questions about where was I because no one will hopefully notice I was here in the first place.

My external obsessions: at 3 a.m. they are peanut butter on bananas of right off the spoon, handfuls of raisins and anything else sweet which, in my place, is very little. I remain obsessed with the all things Needles and Pens (http://www.needles-pens.com). I want to get a copy of “My Penguin” Dracula (http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141033471,00.html) which has a blank cover, one that you can draw or paint on. Ryan Adams, the musician, did an awesome splotchy-type painting of Dracula’s castle on his copy. I want that too.

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January 31, 2008August 5, 2016 by Wickie Stamps

Murder on my Mind

I left Dr. Tieck’s in good shape. He was pleased by my progress and my tolerance of the medications he thinks I’m on.

It’s not very hard to get doctor’s to think you’re doing what they say. No harder than anyone else I guess.

(Fiction; work in progress.)

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October 22, 2007June 17, 2016 by Wickie Stamps

Spiders and flies

“I was brought here by flies,” I said in my sleep. This was not a mere assertion from a demented mind. (We’ll skip that discussion for now.) It was a demonstrative statement of fact. Periodically, I come up with these announcements—and frequently in the company of my boyfriend. These notions (or pronouncement as my partner likes to call them) come in the space between waking and sleeping. Grisly and spooky, this business of sleeping.

There were a couple of things I mentioned on our podcast Head Wound that I said I’d put on our blog. One was the website for my pal Patrick who is the dad of Magenta, the tarantula and also a writer (not Magenta, but Patrick. I don’t think Magenta can write. Although if she could, I would be quite interested to hear what she has to say.) Patrick’s website is: www.patrickletellier.com. Currently, Magenta has no website, although she should. Patrick says he’ll forward me a picture of Miss M. When he does, I’ll give you the link. I also mentioned a cool zine that I liked. Called Bug, it is written by Bryan Kring. (http://www.kringdesign.com/books) He’s got some really interesting zines on his website—Peephole, Wart and Specimen—that I plan on getting. When I do, I’ll let you know what I think. But definitely pick up Bug. It’s cool, creepy and well done. I bought Bug at Pens and Needles, here in SF (http://www.needles-pens.com/home.html). Pens and Needles has DIY goods, great zines and magazines and a great gallery.

Wickie

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October 1, 2007June 17, 2016 by Wickie Stamps

In the dark

per usual. Working to increase my time in here creating. Nasty business this practice of tale telling. Certainly not my agenda as I would be content catching and snacking on the random fly that wanders by. But work I must. We bleak children need to tell our tales. So. First, get out of bed. (Or drag your computer or pens into the bed.) And just do five minutes. None of this carrot on a stick. It is flies, kiddy kiddies that we seek. Oh, I forgot. I don’t eat flies anymore. Or only here and there. For I am a wounded thing and meat tires me. So it is the fake fly on a stick that awaits me. I leave the live ones to…her.

Wickie

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September 25, 2007July 22, 2016 by Wickie Stamps

I sleep with

twenty-seven books on the floor next to me. Just in case. In case of what I am not sure. A moment without input, although I do not know about this as I spend long periods of time in the dark. Doing nothing, but that is not true as I journey here and meet many beings. Books are here too. Or rather notebooks about my head. A through X, they are filled with articles, mostly from newspapers, on murder, cults, forensics and neurology. And little tidbits of one thousand miles of frogs that occasionally manifest in China. These latter events create anxiety as they are outside my understanding and my rules of nature. The creation of books or at least characters occurs here in the dark. At least now. Before I’d pull the blinds, then the curtains, put in earplugs and listen to music playing on my CD as loud as I dared. Mostly the soundtrack to

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

. I have moved on to

Bela–A Tribute to Bauhaus

. Most go. That damnable cash and survival thing. Will tell more of the characters (or entities) here in the dark, but before you go, a little more on Bauhaus the architectual movement (from Wikipedia):

Berlin

Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural ‘policy’ in the 1930s, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had labelled the Bauhaus “un-German” and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for Communists, Russian, and social liberals. Indeed, second director Hannes Meyer was an avowed Communist, and he and a number of loyal students moved to the Soviet Union in 1930.

Under political pressure the Bauhaus was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime on April 11 1933. The closure, and the response of Mies van der Rohe, is fully documented in Elaine Hochman’s Architects of Fortune.

Wickie

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September 25, 2007July 22, 2016 by Jed

The King is the Slave is the King.

Just got back from the Morrissey concert tonight. I don’t know why I couldn’t get wrapped up in it the way I could with the last show I went to, Billy Bragg, who you’d think would be much more cerebral, less visceral. Couple possibilities: Billy Bragg is _about_ combining with other people to change things. Maybe that’s not right. But Morrissey is so much about a singularity and a missed connection with the universe, it sort of seems wrong to be singing along to him with so much of that universe, his love and self-love requited everywhere. It seems like you should be listening to Morrissey alone, on headphones, in high school, and barely surviving it. I do love him, of course. But maybe not when I’m in public.

Another possibility is that I’m such a cerebral fucker that Billy Bragg hits my emotional stripe perfectly. Not cerebral–abstract? Unable to contemplate art without vulgarly mixing in politics? So maybe it’s my fault.

But there in my headiness and abstraction tonight I was, like it or not, thinking about Coriolanus and Hegel while I watched Morrissey and didn’t fall into the music. I’m a director, for film and TV, and directing is a thing I love to do. I especially love it when I see a room full of people enacting words and schemes I’ve put down on paper myself.

I always think of actors as kind of the opposite of directors–they are there to be seen, we are there to see them. I think of something and they bring it into life in some beautiful fantastic way, with some whole other kind of need and intelligence than what I have.

But when Morrissey came out tonight and looked us all over, started up the first song and had the whole club singing his words, I realized he, the looked-at, was directing _us_. Hegel said the problem with being a master is you require a slave. Coriolanus, in the Shakespeare play, is disgusted with the idea that he has to show the mere people his battle scars to win their vote for Roman senator. Who rules who? Morrissey told the truth about his pain and weakness and ugliness over and over and over. He’s a rich man now, happier, I think, and possibly now even minus a crippling personality disorder or two. He’s up on the stage. Our hands are in the air, worshipping, or giving orders. The king is the slave is the king.

Jed

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September 24, 2007July 22, 2016 by Wickie Stamps

Welcome to Heads Will Roll.

At last. A blog so that when I am in my darkened closet I can send a line or two out into the ether so that someone beside my feline (our, as there are two of us who tend her) can know what is going on in my brain and in my life. It is not that…I was going to say she does not care…actually she doesn’t. So I move on. As to the darkened room. I would say I was born in one. Wishful thinking or not as I am intrigued by the image of the bright surgical lights and draped green masks (as well as the sterile floors and implements) that were there at my arrival. And a mother, I assume. Although it may have been the only moment she was present. Forced by circumstances she was. A tendency I have carried forward. That this life requires a presence. That being mine. “So,” I was asked by a very small person. “Under what circumstances are you willing to be here?” The answer is this: in a darkened, small room with very little stimulation, all relationships mediated by something–words, machines, images as well as other forms of manipulation. “Oh, so an artist, in other words,” she said with that wry smile. (In her low lit room–with little outside stimulation). “Yes, I suppose,” always intrigued as I am by her perspective on my existence. “An artist.”

There are few I would take up with in this way of being. But Jed Bell, my collaborator, is one. We communicate through Heads Will Roll, its projects, its visions. I remain wary. Of him. Of her. Or perhaps tentative. Always ready to bolt. Back into my darkened room. With the visions. And that fucking cat.

Wickie

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July 21, 2000September 23, 2016 by Wickie Stamps